And people do not understand fungi very well, they think that fungi cannot move, that it is not autolocomotive. We can move. We roll out of the bed or off the couch or across the floor towards a fixture of wakefulness. A cigarette butt. A pair of shorts. If the radio is on, turn it off. Of the radio is off, turn it on. And when a child enjoys a new toy, she enjoys it to the depths of her soul and is one hundred percent focused on that toy and that time of her life and she forgets her birth and she forgets her adulthood. And when an adult has sex she is one hundred percent focused on her orgasm and feels the sexual flexing of her muscles to the depths of her soul and forgets that she was a child and forgets that she will grow old and dry. But when we stand up finally and blink at the sunlight or blink at the moonlight or blink at the kitchen light all of the blood drains out of our heads and fills our socks and everything goes briefly black and charred and that is what we enjoy to the depths of our soul and the millions of brain cells that die from oxygen starvation forget that we were asleep or that we will be awake, and the depths of our soul are one hundred percent measured by the length of this rush.

Other try to emulate us, but they fail when they succeed. The call themselves slackers but they are vigorous, they get bored, they play video games and watch television and and read comic books. They have pimples and masturbate, keep their bottles of soda cold and contemplate the stars in what the feel is a very shallow manner. They hate the rich, hate the poor, hate anyone who is famous or likes anyone famous or wants to be famous. They borrow change for a twinkie at the convenience store. We won't even go to the convenience store. And we won't even finish the twinkie. We don't care about the famous, don't notice the stars, hate is too difficult to maintain, we drink straight from the tap, we don't have sex, our skin is not unblemished but non-blemished, we can't read even if we know how, if the t.v is on and our eyes are pointing at it we don't even watch it then, the light reflects off our eyeballs and doesn't enter the tunnel to our smooth brains. We don't understand games. We don't understand bored. We are the champions. The Champignons.

We have hands, and we itch. Our flesh is not dead. It is not stretched and taut, it is not pooled in bags of fat, but it is not dead, either. It is largely gray. Caucasian, African American, Asian, it doesn't matter, we're all gray. We do not photosynthesize anymore. We scratch our ribs, scratch our chins and our hair. It is dry and greasy at the same time, and it hangs in our tiny eyes, and we scratch our eyes too. And we scratch our arms. Our backs itch but we try to ignore that because we could scratch our backs but that would be too hard so we don't. The itching usually gets bored and goes away.

And then breakfast. All the old cliches. Leftover pizza. We find it in a box on the floor or in the sink or on the TV. We pick it up, but it is too old to chew, so we just suck on it, try to leech as many nutrients out of it as we can. It tastes dusty and empty, like the pizza-life has run away to inhabit other pizzas. Then we spit out the soggy rind and contemplate the pizza box. Idly pick at dropped bits of olive and strands of cheese and burnt hamburger crumbles.

Or leftover donuts. Or a pot of cold spaghetti found in the pan on the stove. The microwave is too high up to lift the pan, and the pan is metal and doesn't go in the microwave anyway. So eat it cold. Suck on these strands, too, chew half of them and spit the others back into pot, or into the sink. Eating has become a habit, it is a process, a chemical reaction. A jar of peanut butter and a spoon. A half-eaten pop-tart from the day before- eat only half of what's left. The last bite of a big mac. Half chew, swallow the lump, it will bounce around and dissolve all day.

Breakfast makes us realize that we know what fastidious means but we are as unable to practice it as we are to say to say it. The most fundamental fungi will grow on the corpse of a man, will take simple nutrition from that complex being, will spread itself out and cover entirely its multifaceted body. A mushroom on its eyes, mushrooms in its ears, on the face, the arms, legs. Mushrooms have no eyes, no ears, no face or arms or legs, so that even though we comprehend the fastidious nature of the complexity of a human- it would not do to put the heart in the bowels, the bowels in the head, the feet on the arms and the hand on the chest- we are not so fastidious.

And the rest of the day is spent slowly leaking out everything that we imbibed during breakfast.